Vale 80s ideologue rock
Posted on October 29th, 2006, under Viewing, Events, Politics, Saturn Returns
Video Hits is giving me what I want this morning: a countdown to tonight’s ARIAs. The ARIAs are probably my favourite award ceremony. You get a bit more spirit than the film or TV ones, where the script, if it’s Australian, is usually about demonstrating the need for more money (the refrain that doesn’t seem to have changed in 30 years, that we must keep ‘hearing Australian voices’. I want to hear Australian voices if they’re interesting, not for the sake of it. I’d rather see Rachel Griffiths in Six Feet Under than have yet another rural-based drama come on my screen); if it’s American, it’s the competition to see who can make anti-Bush statements without confirming Joe Public’s belief that Hollywood is still full of communists. The ARIAs are about celebrating my kind of people. The ones who are just that little bit unhinged that they believe in music and therefore risk saying what they think. Maybe: as Ian’s PhD will go a long way towards telling us, the (possibility of a) rockstar career path today and the changing nature of the industry might be making more of them a whole lot more careful/boring than they used to be. I think I live for the exceptions.
Watching the ARIAs makes me proud to be Australian. And, especially in a week when so many students walked out of my lecture on John Howard’s ordinariness (doc), I find it increasily important to identify things that do that. Who could forget the year John Butler stood on stage, victory fist in the air, saying one word: “Independence”? That act was the culmination of many years’ work by many predecessors. As Meaghan Morris has said (pdf), these moments need to count as history too.
Midnight Oil are inducted into the Hall of Fame this year. There’s a parable of Australian political history for you. Twenty years equals the shift from Beds are Burning to the ALP. As an overeducated, post-structuralist, twenty-something leftist, I’m defaultly cynical to the point that I don’t believe singing about indigenous rights is the way to make them happen. The fact that the song is played so regularly on radio stations owned by companies with no interest in changing the world as it operates today should be enough proof of that. But it’s unclear to me whether there are still Australian musicians working so consistently to raise awareness of any kind of cause anymore, for good or bad. Take a look at the nominees this year and let’s talk about it.
It’s not that people don’t care, as the analysts of Gen Y would like to tell us. It’s that the language and the tactics and the tools of expressing political affect have changed. Rock is an institution. Like other institutions (academia, politics, the military), it may not serve the same function now as it once did, briefly, or every now and then. And like other institutions, we should take from it what we need when we can, and keep investing in it if those needs are served regularly and well.
After the ARIAs, Ten are screening an ‘encore presentation’ (who else loves that construction?! A response to the other great marketing fallacy, the ‘water cooler conversation’) of Tripping Over. Is that show going to succeed in becoming the next lucrative attempt to reflect what this generation cares about? It will be fun to see. My flatmate summarised it well when we watched it the other night: it looks like a bunch of people into non-committal sex and travelling the world to forget about problems at home.
Sounds fun.
And a lot like a rock career.
Go Augie March.
On October 29th, 2006 at 10:45 pm, jean said:
After just viewing the ceremony, I think the Oils, Bernard Fanning et al read your blog!
On October 30th, 2006 at 10:32 am, ben said:
“It’s that the language and the tactics and the tools of expressing political affect have changed.”
Indeed, there’s been too much complaining from people schooled in reading the ideologies of ’80s pop culture, and not enough figuring out what the fuck is actually going on right now. Much more so with hip-hop than rock, I’d say. But at the same time, I’m still fascinated by a more expansive concept of “virtualised” ’80s Australian pop culture politics that somehow established chains of meaning that weren’t necessarily “ideological”, even if they involved Midnight Oil at certain points. There’s also the signifying chains of ’80s British pop, which integrated occasional leftist flag-waving into a more general culture of utopianism. I haven’t read much British cultural studies, but I get the impression that its emphasis on the microscopic resistances of subculturality would tend to miss that weird relationship between programmatic politics, a public concept of the defining political horizon, and the politics of style. Or maybe I’m retrospectively reading too much into the ’80s. I’m not trying to argue for a revival of “’80s ideological” pop, by any means, but to reread it in less literal terms.
Meanwhile: ah, the ARIAs. Last century I found myself in Silverchair’s hotel room at an ARIAs after-after party, with Daniel Johns standing silently in the corner, looking for everything like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He was a barrel of laughs.
On October 30th, 2006 at 12:01 pm, Mark Bahnisch said:
Was it a Missy Higgins free event? One can only hope.
I missed it as my flatmate refuses to watch anything except on abc and sbs. Though I managed to get him to make an exception for Rome and The Sopranos.
On October 30th, 2006 at 12:06 pm, glen said:
there was definitely a polarisation of the music on display at the ARIAs. political pop (what k-punk would call apologists for capitalist realism, which just happened to be overcoded by the despotic signifier god-head bono; maybe KP is right, pffft…) vs pop materialism. i don’t mind the first kind. PG 4 PM was funny. PG did an event at GB the other week, fuck he is tall. the second type of music maker however should be shot (in the stomach, so it takes a long time for them to die). i am thinking of the evil stupidity of the ‘tv rock’ shit that sounds like a really bad rehash of early 1990s europop-dance. it is worse than fucking ring tone music because at least that serves a function that isn’t simply about tapping into the addictive reactionary dark side of our souls.
the industry side of things was quite funny, with the forced insertion (like a kind of reverse enema) of industry ‘celebrities’ such as the ugly, ugly, ugly radio hosts into proceedings, while the only people/groups of that part of the industry that were celebrated by the actual award winning artists were the independent records, ABC, and triple j. it is a great example of the functioning of the spectacle to forcefully produce certain visibilities within its closed architecture while these other elements sort spill over in a nervous, sweaty-palmed gushing of excitement under the force of attention.
You could see the true artists, if I can be so naive, because they spoke to their own jaggard rhythms.
On October 30th, 2006 at 1:19 pm, ben said:
“Ugly, ugly, ugly radio hosts” — I will not stand by and let you describe Maya Jupiter in that way, thankyou Mr Fuller
On October 30th, 2006 at 2:43 pm, glen said:
no, you’re right ben! sorry! i meant the commercial stations. yes, aesthetics is as simple as a line across capital!!@
and those buffoons with astroboy haircuts speak far too articulately to be anything except salesmen (and women, although there was a conspicuous absence I thought of capitalist women, mostly business-as-usual psychopathic men like kyle sandinmypants or whatever his name is). there was the gendered height thing the whole night, too. such poor planning, what was with that?
knoxville was funny as the clownery, tho, i’ll give them that. he just didn’t give a shit.
On October 30th, 2006 at 9:26 pm, Jason W said:
By the way, I think ‘Rock is an Institution’ would have been a great ’80’s hair metal song. Maybe Twisted Sister or even ‘Hot for Teacher’ era Van Halen… The video would have had the singer in a straightjacket in a padded cell, and the guitarist would have done his solo while getting strapped down to an ECT table. Needless to say there would have been lots of naughty nurses. Rock on. \m/
On November 2nd, 2006 at 2:18 pm, John said:
Hmmm… The only thing I came away with was the abiding conviction that the other applicants at James Mathison’s idol audition must have been really, really shit!